Conservatives blame Brittney Griner, as if being taken hostage was her fault

The conservative fixation on Brittney Griner continues.

A month after the right-wing provocateur Alex Stein brought his smarmy agit-prop to Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport on June 10 and slathered insults on the Phoenix Mercury star, yet another conservative is at it.

Jason Whitlock, a more thoughtful commentator on the right, brought the lumber to Griner.

In a tweet he posted July 10 with an excerpt from his podcast “Fearless with Jason Whitlock,” he said:

“We’ve so distorted what courage actually looks like that there are people who actually think Brittney Griner is courageous.

“That getting busted smuggling a small amount of marijuana — hash — and sitting in jail nine months because of your irresponsible, stupid behavior — oh, that was courageous — and now when you trade the ‘Merchant of Death,’ (Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout) a terrorist, a mass killer, for a 6’8 dumb basketball player, Brittney Griner comes home a hero worthy of being worshiped and treated like the ‘Woman King.’ ”

Griner was taken hostage, not arrested

It’s now been more than seven months since Griner was released from the Russian gulag — yes, gulag (Russian prisons are still hell holes) — and the American right continues to believe Griner was in prison for possessing marijuana — a crime in Russia.

As a conservative who appreciates Jason Whitlock’s real courage to challenge the political monocultures of two of his communities — sports journalists and African Americans — it pains me to tell him he’s wrong.

But he is, along with a lot of other conservatives about Griner. She was not arrested because she broke the law.

She was taken hostage by Vladimir Putin in his conflict with the Western world.

How do we know this?

We know it because not long after the Russians released Griner, they took another American hostage – Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich.

Case in point: journalist Evan Gershkovich

On March 29, Russia's Federal Security Service arrested Gershkovich at a restaurant in the city of Yekaterinburg and accused him of espionage.

You don’t hear any conservatives arguing today that Gershkovich was a fool to break Russian law — or as the Russians put it, “(for) acting on the instructions of the American side, (collecting) information constituting a state secret about the activities of one of the enterprises of the Russian military-industrial complex.”

You would be a fool to think that is true.

Likewise, knowing what we know today, it is foolish to believe Brittney Griner was imprisoned because she carried tiny amounts of hashish oil in her suitcase.

The arrest of an American basketball player whom the Russians oligarchs pay millions to entertain their people was an extraordinary act.

So was the arrest of an American journalist.

The Russians had not taken an American journalist prisoner since the old Soviet Union days, when its KGB arrested U.S. News & World Report journalist Nicholas Daniloff in 1986.

What made the Russians even more ruthless

Something changed.

Evan Gershkovich “is part of this overall escalation — Putin’s conflict with the West," said New York Times Moscow Bureau Chief Anton Troianovski, a good friend of Gershkovich’s and, like him, the son of Soviet emigrees.

"(It's) yet another way to show the West that Putin is ready to take action that would escalate this overall conflict."

“The fact that Evan has an American passport made him more of a target,” Troianovski told the PBS program “Amanpour & Company.”

“We’ve seen Russia practicing, essentially, hostage-taking with American citizens, as happened with Brittney Griner.”

Another view: Griner's freedom had a hidden cost

Griner was arrested in unusual times, exactly one week before the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

At the time, the Russians had 100,000 troops massed on the border of Ukriane and ready to go in. President Joe Biden and his western allies were in war of words with the Russians.

Blame Vladimir Putin, not Brittney Griner

Ten days before Griner’s arrest, Biden stood with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and warned Vladimir Putin that if he invades Ukraine, the United States would shut down the $9 billion Nordstream 2 pipeline that feeds Russian natural gas to Western Europe.

The Western allies were already threatening serious economic sanctions against the Russians if their tanks rolled.

In response, Vladimir Putin took an American hostage. Released her in a prisoner swap. And turned around and immediately took another.

“This is one of those things that would have been really, really hard to imagine not long ago,” said The Times’ Troianovski.

The time has come to stop blaming Brittney Griner for her own imprisonment and start blaming the tyrant who used marijuana as a pretext to kidnap an American.

Phil Boas is an editorial columnist with the Arizona Republic. Email him at phil.boas@arizonarepublic.com.

This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Brittney Griner wasn't arrested. She was taken hostage